Elite Dangerous and i also love old school mechwarrior 2

KSP 1

DCS (Digital Combat Simulator)

Tons of well-simulated combat aircraft. IL-2 is probably the closest simulator to it.

Elite Dangerous

I'm going to go with Euro truck simulator 2.

The experience of chill driving across europe and listening to podcasts is nice. The game isn't complicated enough to affect listening experience, but also engaging enough on it's own right that it stays interesting.

I have probably seen 80% or so of the roads and cities, bit they still feel fresh... Could be that I'm forgetting places faster than I'm getting familiar with them as well.

I do have a steering wheel and pedals, but they're just too cumbersome to get out and my wheel stand is made for someone at least 20 shorter than I am, so the experience is hampered a bit anyway. Because I'm lazy I've just resulted to driving witn mouse and keyboard combo.

Edit: typos. Typing on phone is butts

A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba. Still the crispiest and most enjoyable flight sims I've ever played.

X-Wing was the reason I jumped from Atari ST to DOS/Windows.

Goat Simulator

Carmageddon. It taught me everything I needed to know about the role of pedestrians while driving.

Assetto Corsa

Amazing game, could have more varied maps in free access servers, but the game is old so it's ok

Dwarf Fortress, aka drunken dwarf simulator.

I have spent a lot of money on iRacing and Elite Dangerous. I kind of miss it but also feel that i was way too deep into it to be having fun. It was a struggle to always make things better and i was not really enjoying my self

Assetto Corsa, hands down. The mod community have made it into something quite special. I've got pretty much every other driving/racing sim as well, but I keep coming back to AC.

I can't believe no-one's mentioned BeamNG.drive. The stuff that game simulates is off the charts. It's been in 'early access' forever, but if you're even remotely interested in driving simulators, it's the gold standard for a realistic driving experience. Crashing in VR in this game is the most visceral thing ever. It'll change you.

Here's a clip of me driving a RHD Piccolina around one of my local roads a kindly modder added to the sim until I crash catastrophically.

I spent a lot of hours in F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Atari ST as a kid. The manual for that thing was unbelievably in-depth. I'm utterly convinced I could fly real combat missions in that (fictional) plane.

Motor Town, Operation Harsh Doorstop, Easy Red 2, Sailwind, Hydroneer, Liftoff!, Shredders, Old Market Simulator, Cold Waters Dot Mod, Nebulous Fleet Command, From The Depths, Helicopter Gunship DEX and Out Of Ore are all great "sims".

I also consider extremely mechanically deep rpgs with realistic systems like Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead or Unreal World to be simulators and both are superb.

I am trying out Ships At Sea but don't have enough experience yet to give a thumbs up or down yet on it (Check out Sailwind!).

Sailwind is a "sailing simulator" as in actual sailing!

For me, my favorites are:

RAH-66 Comanche for flying sim.

Wolfpack (from Brøderbund) for submarine sim. I believe it is also free on archive.org. (Added link: https://archive.org/details/msdos_WolfPack_1990)

Euro Truck Simulator 2 for trucking sim.

F1 2019 for racing sim. But it pretty much requires a wheel and pedals if you want to get really good, which does add to the cost.

EDIT: added link

This has to be roller coaster. Period.

X-plane. Ms flight simulator is drop dead gorgeous, but X plane has a better flight engine.

It was Aces High II

UBOAT, submarine sim and even though it gets very tense at times it is also quite cathartic.

Euro/American Truck Simulator, its the perfect game to chill to and I have been known to fall asleep while driving :/

Derail Valley Simulator. I like my trains.

Sim Collector Simulator

Rise Of Flight - United

I've always been a little obsessed with Sopwith Camels because they are one of the prettiest but also most insane things to fly into battle with. ROF does an excellent job or giving me that fix :) Also ROF is free to play (and the DLC with the Sopwith right now is super cheap).

Apache longbow 2 from 1997.

Edit: got original mixed with 2

ACC is my favorite right now.

I spent way too much time on Red Baron. The simulation was just good enough to convey the awkwardness of piloting machines that in the end were made of wood, fabric and heroic faith, including the Sopwith Camel's notorious torque issue that made it constantly drift to the right.

I like OpenTTD. Based off the old Transport Tycoon game

American Truck Simulator.

Train Sim World. Yes Dovetail have their problems, yes its expensive if you want a lot of the latest DLC (why, its not multiplayer so doesn't decrease in popularity like multiplayer game DLC), yes its not a well optimised graphical tour de force. But damn is it relaxing to play with multiple levels of difficulty that are entirely optional. Its possible to get hundreds of hours of replay from a single route if that's what you enjoy.

IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946

SimTower is my jam or SimCopter

VTOL VR

https://store.steampowered.com/app/667970/VTOL_VR/

Not super in-depth like some of these other games but I love Snowrunner. I can count on 3 fingers the number of games I’ve spent over $100 on the game+ additional content in my entire life. Civ5, Civ6, and Snowrunner. It’s such a relaxing game but can definitely be difficult as well. Also i can play music at the same time and not miss any story because there isn’t really any story.

Euro truck simulator 2! I have lots of hours in this game, playing date and night. At some point I had a Logitech wheel with pedals and shifts, it was so damn good!!!

My routine was to get a long route through graphic and small roads, listening to radio for hours.

My parents got me a copy of Harrier Jump Jet by Microprose one christmas. I can't even begin to imagine how many hours I spent on that game, both actually playing it and studying the manual for it. Still have the manual actually but the floppies are long gone.

After that I got every Microprose sim I could get my hands on, F14 Fleet Defender was probably my favorite after Harrier.

Then I kinda lost interest in simulators until Arma came along, spent years where I hardly played anything else.

Nowadays though ETS is pretty much the only sim I play.

SWOTL.EXE

Farming Simulator.

I grew up in the country and moved to a city. It's neat to see how accurate the older tractors and equipment are to real life.

Anything by Janes Combat Simulations.

Falcon BMS. It’s a mod of falcon 4.0 from the 90’s. Best combat flight sim out there. DCS is prettier, I guess, but, overpriced garbage by comparison.

B-17 (intellivision)

F19 (Atari computer)

Jumbo jet (Atari computer)

SimCity 4 and Factorio.

I like goat simulator

BeamNG.drive

Starsector

Dwarf Fortress

Dota 2 (psychological warfare simulator)

Heavy Gear 1 and 2. So much fun when multiplayer ever worked.

XWing Alliance will probably always be my favorite, but Elite Dangerous is up there. If Elite had story missions and a singleplayer campaign to elaborate on the world building, it probably would be my favorite.

I definitely have the most time spent in Project Cars 2 on PS4, but I've since switched to PC sims and have been playing Automobilista 2 since it is the most similar.

I'd like to get into Assetto Corsa more but idk how to get the mods running on Linux / Steam

Oh my god I think this is one of the two games from my childhood that I first played and have not for the life of me been able to find

The other is some weird frog sidescroller platformer I got at Staples as a kid in the late aughts or possibly early 2010s

The one where you get to shoot jfk.